Commentary

This week the U.S. will preview five stamps featuring 20th Century journalists.

A press notice of an Oct. 5 press conference names them: war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998); John Hersey (1914-1993), whose most famous work, was Hiroshima; CBS correspondent George Polk (1913-1948), killed while reporting on corruption involving U.S. aid in Greece after WW II; Ruben Salazar (1928-1970), the first Mexican-American major mainstream media journalist, who was was shot and killed by
a deputy sheriff while reporting on a Vietnam War protest; and WW II correspondent Eric Sevareid (1912-1992).

From the press note:The U.S. Postal Service honors five journalists who reported — often at great personal sacrifice — some of the most important events of the 20th century. Working in radio, television or print, these distinguished journalists filed stories from domestic and international hot spots. Their description of conflicts and issues helped Americans respond more intelligently to events. The stamps will be issued in 2008.

The official name is ‘Union of Myanmar’, but media outlets appear split on what to call the Southeast Asian nation once known as Burma. The BBC and the Bangkok Post steadfastly stick to Burma, while the Globe and Mail uses Myanmar, stating the name better reflects pre-colonial terminology.

“Never has there been a greater need for independent, original, credible information about our complex society and the world at large. Never has technology better enabled the instantaneous global transmission of pictures, sounds, and words to communicate such reporting. But all this is occurring in a time of absentee owners, harvested investments, hollowed-out newsrooms, and thus a diminished capacity to adequately find and tell the stories …. at the moment, the landscape looks precarious, particularly for serious editors and reporters….”

“…other economic models that can produce substantive journalism suddenly look more interesting and relevant to a profession under siege. And while much has been written of late about the dire state of commercial journalism, very little has been said about various independent, noncommercial initiatives specifically designed to produce that kind of substance.”Continue Reading Journalism’s other road

American journalist Seymour Hersh has much to say In a Q&A interview about the Internet’s impact on journalism:

“There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to the New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism. …We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.”

“Paying an Author and Putting Her Down” is a report in the New York Times about Naomi Klein’s odd appearance in the National Post. The Post paid for the rights to run excerpts of Klein’s recent book and thus aided her success. Then, it ran those excerpts beside commentary trashing Klein (example: at worst, “her book reads like an extended conspiracy theory“).

The Times’ piece is an odd and somewhat amusing little tale — what a pity it’s a tale unlikely to be told within Canada’s insular, incenstuous and uber-concentrated mainstream media environment. (Please, someone prove me wrong.)Continue Reading Klein and the National Post

Maclean’s, true to form lately, is at the centre of controversy again. This time it’s in the U.S., because of a magazine cover depicting U.S. President George W. Bush dressed as Saddam Hussein, including a moustache, beret and military attire.

USA Today took up the issue on a blog. Lamented one commenter, “How did we go from a noble task of liberating millions of Iraqis under a brutal regime headed by a madman to the cover of this perverted magazine with its twisted logic? How can anyone sympathize with this pathetic twisted view on Iraq?” Answered another commenter: “I’m surprised it took so long for someone to come up with such an appropriate concept.” It goes on, of course, into the predictable attacks and debate on Canada’s (ir)responsibility. Yawn.

One good thing about the charges Dan Rather is making that government and corporations unduly influence the U.S. media is that they’ll be put to the test, in his law suit against CBS for wrongful dismissal. That’s critical because, as with many conspiracy theories, Rather’s allegations are compelling. And — as with all conspiracy theories — there should be a high standard of proof. Can Rather prove his charges?

From today’s CBC story:Journalist Dan Rather, who recently filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS for wrongful dismissal, says the U.S. government and large corporations have undue influence over newsrooms.

“Democracy cannot survive, much less thrive, with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in the news,” Rather said on CNN’s Larry King Live on Thursday night.

And here’s Mary Mapes coming to Rather’s defence, on the Huffington Post site, charging that “journalism has become corporatized, trivialized and castrated:”

It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush’s National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.

What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.

To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War — and then covered it up — was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault.

— Canada’s broadcasters should be required to compete for their licences when they come up for renewal, which would make incumbent companies more accountable and ensure new players can break into the industry, regulators were told Wednesday. Grant Robertson, in the Globe and Mail, reports that a media union wants licence renewals opened to competition to bring more diversity in an era of consolidation.In context, commercial networks argue that Canadian companies need to grow through mergers and takeovers to compete on a global stage being reshaped by the Internet. On the other side, media guilds, arts advocates and production industry groups argued that consolidation is dangerous to the diversity of broadcast voices in Canada.

I often wonder how many of today’ media “products” — yes, those things that we used to think of as “journalism” outlets — have gone from aspiring to straight reporting to routinely reporting everything from a premise that our society ought to be run on principles of Economism, a libertarian and free-market perspective that everything is for sale and every public policy decision is about the bottom line of profit-driven corporations. (Disclosure: I am a fiscal conservative and consider myself a centrist.)

What got under my skin was the Ottawa Citizen’s take on this week’s CRTC hearings — an absolutely perfect example of why CanWest, which has rid itself of numerous journalists and columnists who do not have a neo-conservative bent, should not dictate the state of Canada’s journalism by being allowed to run a near-monopoly in many regions.

The story on the Citizen web site does not indicate whether the analysis by Deirdre McMurdy is a report or an opinion column. Perhaps all readers of Canada.com, or the Citizen, know that she’s the Chief Political Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and a business journalist. Better yet, the Citizen should tell readers her role.

A search shows there’s nothing else on the Ctiizen site so far this week about the hearings, so I assume the Citizen relies on McMurdy’s piece to tell its readers what’s going on. Her piece discusses the alarm in the markets about the prospect of CRTC regulation of publicly-traded media companies. The piece questions the need for this week’s CRTC examination of media consolidation and ownership concentration, and the diversity of voices: “…having summoned the circus to town for five days, the federal regulator has now created the general expectation that a) there is a problem and b) something must be done about it.” It goes on:

“But the question that many insiders — including those in CRTC ranks — are now asking each other, is just what that problem might be.”

The only thing more nerve-racking for a publicly traded media company than a government regulator looking for a problem, is the one that goes out of its way to create a new one. And given the jumpy state of capital markets, that — at least according to a confidential report from investment analysts at Credit Suisse — is the real danger in this hearing.”

The Citizen piece asserts the common argument that the diversity of the voices in Canadian media “has never been greater” because, in part, of new media and specialty channels, and says there’s an overwhelming consensus among broadcasters on this. in their CRTC submissions this week. (That outright ignores the entire CBC. A correct phrasing would be there’s a consensus among commercial broadcasters with a stake in the lack of new regulations.) It goes on:

…. All of which leaves the CRTC with three basic options: do nothing, do something, or do nothing and make it look like something. And that’s precisely the sort of soggy turf that the devil likes as a playground.”

The devil’s playground? What about the fact that ownership of Canada’s media playground is the most concentrated in the developed world? The only nod the story gives to the outpouring of concern about journalism in Canada — from the CBC, from journalists, from journalism organizations, from the Senate report, etc., — is quoting Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa talking about net neutrality.

McMurdy’s summary, her last line summing up the
piece, seems to be the Citizen’s definitive word about the CRTC hearings dealing with Canadian journalism — which many of us believe to be a pillar of Canadian democracy. So what nuggets of wisdom do Citizen readers take away after reading the piece? Says McMurdy: “Money, after all, is the universal language.”

J-Source and ProjetJ are publications of the Canadian Journalism Project, a venture among post-secondary journalism schools and programs across Canada, led by Ryerson University, Université Laval and Carleton University and supported by a group of donors.